SEEKING PEACE AMID DISTRESS

By Dustin Jayroe

Three years ago this month, my wife and I welcomed our firstborn into the world. A son who very quickly lit up our world in ways we never could have imagined, nor were we ready for how much we needed it right when he gave it. He was born in April 2020, the first full month of COVID-19’s presence in Arkansas — a time when practically everyone, regardless of politics, was operating under an ominous cloud of fear. We brought that cloud with us to the hospital.

SOMETIMES, LIFE

Then, he was born; almost immediately, he was whisked down to the NICU with a spontaneous pneumothorax, or collapsed lung.

Last month, our little family readied for a second minius to sprout to life. A girl this time, who (fingers crossed) would look more like mom than the first (with offense meant for me, not my son). We carried with us less nervous baggage this time around, and very much looked forward to a “normal” birth experience.

Then, she was born; almost immediately, she was taken down to the NICU with respiratory distress — fluid on her lungs initially, and what was described to us as “probably” pneumonia in the days that followed.

After seven days in the hospital with her, we finally got the green light to come home, where the full spectrum of new parent joys could at last take hold. Three days later, an EF3 tornado ripped through Little Rock like a serrated knife.

Our son and daughter made full recoveries within days, thanks to the nurses and doctors at Baptist Health Medical Center. The tornado missed our house by a couple of miles and our son’s daycare by a couple of blocks, thanks to sheer luck.

That word — luck — wasn’t always an easy one upon which to arrive. Our waists have waded through the depths of feelings of unluckiness plenty of times over the years, wishing such traumas would have avoided us and wondering, “Why us?” Reducing it down to luck may even seem a bit blasphemous now, given how fortunately we finished these three sagas of life, but it’s about as far as we’ll go to rationalize our cards. Plenty of precious, purehearted babies never make it out of the NICU, and a number of friends, colleagues and strangers lost everything to that tornado; if we were spared by anything more than luck, what makes us more deserving?

Sometimes, life itself seems like a fragile impossibility, a delicate flower desperately hanging on from the moment it rises out of the soil. Sometimes, it’s a wonder life exists at all — here on this planet, or any other for that matter. Like the crux of the Fermi paradox regarding aliens: If life is easy, where is everybody?

Nevertheless, we persist.

And despite having pretty mediocre physical attributes by Earth’s standards, we thrive.

I’m told my own life hung in the balance during birth, with a wrapped umbilical cord choking me with each contraction. Then, my kids found their own ways to live up to the family legacy of dramatic infant syndrome. Yet, here we are. And here you are, despite the elements that have swirled around your petals.

Like Dr. Ian Malcom said in “Jurassic Park,” life (uh) finds a way – either by some divine creation or simply a universal coincidence. Against all odds or by them. There’s a comfort in any explanation.

It’s a comfort worth seeking as our state heals from the wreckage left by this latest cloud, which — like the ones before and the ones that will follow — precipitated pain, inequity and grief.

But we, like life, will find a way.